Week One

I’ve now been in my ‘training village,’ just shy of a week, and it is indeed a village – with every charming, rustic stigma that you could attach to it. Roosters crow throughout the day. Cows come home at night. The roughly 700 residents here know exactly what one another are doing at all times, and they especially know what myself and the other seven volunteers, who have so briskly descended on their otherwise much more predictable lives, are up to. If I go on a walk with a girl from the village, the rumor mill will begin churning away at full speed with speculation. Already this has happened, caught me a bit off guard, and is something I’ll need to be wary of. But our goings on are monitored on a much more mundane level as well. If another volunteer is taking a nap, a Tateek (Armenian for grandmother) will go over to another tateek’s home for coffee and share this news as if it were quite imminent. Soon enough the whole village is aware this person is taking a nap, and by the time the napping individual wakes up, wherever he/she goes people will ask how the nap was. This has also already happened at least once.

This is not to say that the folks in the village are all gossips and voyeurs. I’ve been trying to take the experience of being spotlighted in stride so far, seeing it as more endearing than rude in any way. These people are genuinely interested in what we do, and I suppose it’s understandable. If I had grown up in a village of some 100 residences in the middle of the mountains, with only one pot-hole ridden road connecting me to any form of civilization, I would be deadly curious about eight individuals from an ostensibly super-rich nation who suddenly decided it was a good idea to live little old Nurnus.

My first day here, my host father Andranik – a very kind, powerfully built man with a rug of grey hair on his arms and chest who offers me at least one shot of vodka every time we eat dinner together – showed me his garden and orchard, something that I think is not just a point of pride but also a tangible symbol of how life works here. Our crude communication of pointing and broken Armenian eventually revealed to me that he has – among other things—apricot trees, apple trees, tomatoes, cucumbers, and strawberries all growing back there. My host family has cows, chickens and goats as well. They also keep bees. As far as I can tell, nearly everything that I’m eating comes right from the backyard. Cheese, eggs, honey, tomato and cucumber salad, bread from hand rolled dough, barbecued chicken roasted above a toonirh (a fire pit in a small enclosed area), it all seems to have come from right next to me, and I’m pretty floored by it. In these ten weeks of training we are expected to learn a lot about the Armenian language and about teaching methods for non-native speakers and how to be an effective and credible volunteer, but a lot of other lessons will be instilled just from being immersed in this culture of an Armenian mountain village. I feel pretty lucky right now, and I already feel my perceptions of wealth shifting a bit.

During our first few days of orientation, another volunteer shared a quote that had been passed down to him before he and his group went out to serve: “go out and live wildly uncomfortable lives,” it went.

It’s a great line. I walk up and down winding roads to school every morning, dodging cow shit and glancing nervously at the stray dogs or occasional herd of cattle or sheep that may accost me on the way. In the past week I’ve had to rely heavily, almost completely on people I’ve only just met. I can’t speak with them hardly a single word every time we eat together, which is three times a day, yet they feed me ridiculous amounts of food. Andranik offers me “oghi” (vodka) every dinner time until I make it totally clear to him that I’m done toasting. We manage to communicate one way or the other, and despite my slight discomfort, each night before I sleep I look out from my house’s balcony and see Mt. Ara staring back at me serene and gorgeous beyond the deep valley that the village sits on. While I can’t yet fully communicate with the people I live with, they manage to make clear how much they accept me and see me as their own. This is already kind of fun.